Kids and Candy
I’ve always been a big fan of Halloween candy.
When I was younger, my friends and I would go to the “good” neighborhood, where many houses gave out full-sized candy bars. One guy even gave out dollar bills (?) instead of candy, and a dentist gave out toothbrushes. I secretly liked the toothbrushes, too, but never told my friends, since they were like “ugh! a toothbrush!” That’s pretty much the only neighborhood we’d hit, and return home with buckets and pillowcases stuffed full of candy.
My mom or dad would go through all of our Halloween goodies, and from then on, we could eat them however we’d like. Our buckets of candy were in the pantry, and we knew that a sweet treat was ready and waiting for us. For the first couple of nights, we’d take advantage of it and eat chocolate until it gave us stomachaches, but after those initial candy gorges, it wasn’t too difficult to space it out. I don’t ever remember finishing all of my Halloween candy… I’d eventually get sick of it, and it would end up in the trash.
I’ve heard a lot of different methods in families when it comes to Halloween candy, or treats in general. Some families allow a little bit of candy, and take the rest away, others allow a certain amount each day, and so on. One of girls I used to teach at the dance studio (and babysat) was only allowed one sweet treat each day. We went out for dinner, and I asked her if she wanted to share a pizookie, and she said “no thank you, Miss Gina, I’ve had my sweet treat for the day already.”
Now, I’m not trying to get too ahead of myself here, as the little lady hasn’t even been born yet, but pretty soon it will be execution instead of theory. Since tomorrow is Halloween, I can’t help but wonder what our own candy situation will be like.
We really want our little girl to have a healthy relationship with food. There won’t be any “good” or “bad” foods in our house, but she’ll learn which foods make you feel good and contribute to your health, and others that are just delicious to eat but have very little nutritional benefit. We’ve agreed that we’ll keep the same foods that we always have, with some kid-friendly versions in there (Annie’s makes fantastic kid-friendly snacks). I’d like my baby to eat as healthily as possible, but at the same time, I feel like every kid needs some confetti cake or chicken nuggets in their life. I don’t want her to grow up and feel like she has to experience all of the foods she was never allowed to have in her childhood, and let her find her own balance.
I’ve also heard that kids eat the food that they see the parents eating, so if that’s the case, she’ll like green smoothies, oatmeal, salmon, goat cheese, and pizookies 😉
If you trick-or-treated when you were younger, what was your family’s candy policy like? Did they help you moderate, or let you have full reign? How did your parents influence your eating habits today?
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My eating habits are all my own, unfortunately. I’ve evolved to have pretty healthy eating habits. My mom is a sweet tea lovin’, good country cookin’ kinda woman. I put earth balance on the table for grilled corn we had once and she wouldn’t even touch it. Sigh.
My dad loved steak and eggnog. Lol I don’t share my love of green smoothies, sweet potatoes, big hearty salads or anything with my family! 🙁 My sister was a vegetarian for 5 years before the Marines and I think she influenced me the most as far as learning about vegetables.
My parents pretty much did the same thing as yours — they gave us a free reign and we figured out on our own that it was a bad idea to have chocolate for dinner after a day or two 😉 then again — I did struggle with anorexia so I can’t say I had a healthy relationship with food — but I don’t think Halloween / how my parents handled Halloween contributed to that at all!
Sarah seems to really like eating what Mama and Daddy are eating, and I’m trying to take advantage of that before we hit any picky phases.
That’s one of my major motivators for getting healthy (well that and seeing pictures of myself recently.) But I don’t want her to have some of the food issues I’ve had to deal with, and want to set a good example. Granted, I also think that there are special occasions, like Halloween, that warrant a little splurge, but there’s a huge difference between enjoying a few pieces of candy after trick or treating and gorging on a whole bag of Tootsie Rolls (not that I did that when I was eleven or anything… )
I think it’s a great idea not to label foods as “good” or “bad”. This might easily make children feel left out when all other kids (in school etc.) can have treats and they don’t.
As for me, while I didn’t trick-or-treat (it has only become popular around here during the last few years) my parents generally let me have candy and other treats but watched how much I ate and interfered if they felt it was too much. Unfortunately, though, that just made me eat more sweets when they weren’t around. Still, I learned my way around healthy living and am now able to enjoy treats in moderation.
Don’t stress yourself too much about this just yet – I’m sure you’ll make the right decisions and be a great mum to your little one!
It’s great that you want your kid to have a healthy relationship with food! I think my parents did a good job of that for me and my brothers. My mom always served at least one vegetable with dinner, and when I went to college, it stuck. I would always get at least one vegetable on my plate from the dining hall. As for halloween candy, they let us eat as much or little as we wanted. I’m not a big candy person these days; chips and salsa are my weakness numero uno.*
you and me both, girl. i loooooooove chips and salsa
ahah I was an easy kid I never liked candy or sweets, only orange lollipops. To this day I am the same with sweets, anyone I went trick or treating with loved me I gave them all my candy LOL.
I would always dump out my candy in the living room, my dad would take all my snickers, and I would sort everything (seriously) then I would have a few pieces, and then it’d disappear, sometimes we’d eat some after dinner or I would get a piece in my lunch. I’m fairly certain my parents would eat it all when I wasn’t looking, and just share enough to not make me suspicious. Haha. I never had much of a sweet tooth, so I would get over it pretty quickly 🙂
My parents definitely set me up with a good food relationship and I feel good that I’ve done the same with my girls. However, we do have the Sugar Plum Fairy visit on Halloween night. I let each of the girls keep 5 pieces of candy and the rest they leave out for the sugar plum fairy. She needs the dandy to help build villages in sugar land. In exchange, she leaves them trinkets like paints, stickers, etc. and always a new toothbrush 🙂
I love that idea!!! We kept the candy in our bedrooms and I’d always sneak in quietly and gorge on multiple chocolate bars at one time. I think that’d how I developed my tendency to eat in secret (which later contributed to an eating disorder). With that said, I’ll probably raise my kids with the ‘one treat a day’ mentality.
Great topic Gina! And that little girl you babysat sounds SO cute! When I was little, my parents would sort through our (my sister and I) candy to be sure it was all sealed and safe etc. My dad wasn’t really that strict about candy eating but my mum would make each of us put our Halloween loot into a big plastic bowl, which she kept on top of the fridge where we couldn’t reach it.. well, not without a chair anyway… 😉 We were allowed a treat in our lunches each day, and might have been given one after dinner too – can’t quite remember! Either way, I remember the first couple of days being a novelty and wanting to eat tons of it, but like you said, a few stomach aches later, it’s not quite as much fun!
I think your plan sounds absolutely perfect. I was always a super picky eater… who ironically LOVED all vegetables. No one forced me to eat the things I didn’t like – they just encouraged the healthy things that I did like – and as I grew up, my horizons grew widely. I eat almost everything now, but still no red meat 🙂 I remember being allowed to eat whatever candy I wanted on Halloween… I had been taught moderation with sweets so I don’t ever remember feeling deprived or not being allowed to eat certain things at certain times after Halloween. However, I’ve also heard of letting kids “trade” in some of their candy for something special, like a toy etc. and I think that’s something I would like to try someday when I have kids in addition to teaching moderation and intuitive eating.
One thing that definitely sticks out in my mind from my childhood has to do with my cousin. I remember she got one of those giant Hershey’s kisses and I remember hearing her mom saying to her, “now, you know you had better not eat that all at once, because it’s over 1,000 calories and it will make you fat”. I was pretty little when this happened, maybe about 10 or so which would mean my cousin was 8, and I remember thinking even at that young of an age that those comments could really hurt her relationship with food and it made me so sad for her 🙁
Gina, as far as feeding your little girl when she arrives and is big enough to try all sorts of foods, do you think you will feed her meat, dairy and gluten?
yep. she probably won’t eat a lot of red meat, since i rarely cook it (the pilot will every couple of weeks or so), but she’ll probably eat a combo of what the pilot and i eat. mostly plant-based with some organic meat and dairy in there. i’m certainly going to give her gluten (many foods with gluten in them have more nutrients than the GF versions), unless it ends up being that she’s intolerant. i’m praying that she has no food allergies to deal with, though.
if she decides later that she doesn’t want to eat meat or dairy, that’s her choice, but i don’t want her first hamburger to be at a friend’s house when she’s little
That seems like a really great plan. I know a lot of people struggle with food allergies (my boyfriend can’t eat any fruits at all!), and it makes planning meals a little more difficult. He’s often left out of the delicious smoothies I make and is stuck with one made of rice milk, ice and protein powder. I have a cousin who is vegetarian but extremely unhealthy about it and is raising her two sons to be vegetarians as well. The saddest thing I saw recently was her bashing meat and telling them it was disgusting, used to be alive etc when their father still eats meat. Meanwhile the two boys favorite food is ramen!
Anyway, I love your blog and really admire you for putting this all out there! I also envy your ability to find all of those different selections of goat cheese! I live in NJ and can only find the traditional goat cheese and a spreadable with flavoring here and there. We have TJ’s & whole paycheck but they are so far… I guess thats my only option!
Cute belly+candy pic! Sounds like you have a similar food philosophy to Ellyn Satter. She’s an RD with an amazing philosophy on how to teach kids to eat healthy. I highly recommend checking out her books! Happy Halloween!
i definitely will- thank you!
My mom always ate pretty healthy. For a while, I rebelled and ate all the crap I could get my hands on when I was at friends houses, but now I eat pretty similar to my mother. There is definitely something to be said about being allowed to eat stuff and not being allowed to. I always wonder if I would have eaten so badly in high school if my mom hadn’t made all of that stuff forbidden. Possibly though. That said, I was allowed to eat Halloween candy.
My brother and I would dump all our candy out on the floor, so my parents could go through it (make sure nothing was opened, etc), then we would trade (I like chocolate, he likes sweet candy). Then we were pretty much allowed to eat what we wanted. My brother ate all his in a few days, and I took my own sweet time eating mine. It’s funny, but we are still like this today!
I grew up with two brothers, and while they would go to their rooms and organize their candy, I would eat a ton of mine, run around the house like crazy, and then hoard the rest and make it last. We ate very healthy in my house so it was a fun treat that never harmed anyone. I don’t believe in being too restrictive with kids, just giving them lots of healthy options too!
My mom was wacky about our halloween candy. We’d get 2 pieces the night of trick-or-treating. Then she’d choose what she wanted, my dad would get the 3 Musketeers, and the rest would be hidden until it was deemed “treat time” after dinner. We couldn’t remind the parentals that it was treat time or else we wouldn’t get them. I’d usually have entire plastic grocery bags of candy left the following halloween…
I was never a candy-lover when I was little. Whenever I went trick-or-treating I would have an almond joy or two and call it good. I gave the rest away to my big brother in exchange for household duties:)
I have a poor relationship with food (I’m actively trying to make peace) and one of the things I fear the most is imposing my food “labeling” on my future children. I want my children to grow up respecting their bodies and enjoying eating healthy while indulging on occasion.
My mom was pretty strict when it came to sweets. It kind of led to me rebelling by eating as many as I could when I wasn’t home. I remember sometimes asking a friend if I could play at their house after school, but I really just wanted some cookies. As a result, I was a little chubby growing up and when I got to college, gained a lot of weight. It wasn’t until my junior year when I started learning about being a healthy and have since lost 60 lbs. I know my mom meant well, but I just don’t think her strategy works. My friends whose parents let them figure things out for themselves never seemed to struggle with weight or binging on sweets like I have. I think your plan sounds just perfect, very similar to what I’ve been think I’ll do when I have kids myself!
My parents pretty much let my brother and me eat as much as we wanted. I think by them not making a big deal about it, we learned to self-regulate and not attach too much value to it. Sure, we went a little crazy the first night we had a giant pillowcase of candy all to ourselves, but eventually we’d get sick of it and often not even finish it.
My parents are both vegetarians (and now mostly vegan), and this has very much shaped how I view food. I ate meat at college and when I would hang out with friends in high school, but ultimately switched back to a vegetarian diet a few years ago, after I took the time to educate myself on what I was eating. Because of my parents, I am very much a compassionate and conscientious eater and I give a lot of thought to where my food comes from. I’m thankful, however, that they were never overbearing about food or vegetarianism and let me come to my own conclusions and determine what was right for me.
That little girl that said she’d already had her sweet treat for the day sounds absolutely adorable! My mom would always inspect my candy and then let me have a few pieces each day. Of course, if she wasn’t around we would always sneak a few pieces too! lol.
My parents never let us go trick or treating, but I did get to eat the candy that they gave out (different culture)
When I was young, I was allowed to eat a certain amount a day. I was never allowed to keep my candy bag in my bedroom like all of my friends….but looking back, I’m glad that was the rule! For my kids, after they go to bed on Halloween, I go through their bags and throw out most of the candy. I keep a few chocolate bars and other treats, but that’s it. At least they are young enough that they don’t even notice 😉 They are allowed to have 2 treats a day.
I cant remember having very many limitations on the candy…at my house we had a chip drawer, a soda fridge and tons of sweets and candy all the time! My friends loved it but to me it was no big deal because me and my sisters were used to it. There did become a time when our parents limited us to 2 sodas a day but thats all i can remember. To this day none of us have even come remotely CLOSE to struggling with weight and i am a health fitness specialist now and we all ran track/xc. I think my parents did a good thing by not making food seem “special” to us! 🙂 we are all in our 20’s now and i think we turned out perfectly healthy! the secret(or not so secret) is to always be active though!
I’m jealous of your baby bump. My little bean will be 3 months old on Tuesday and I miss my belly! Enjoy it. I think you have a good grasp on what will be a good compromise for you little one. I struggled with my weight and after losing 100 lbs recently I constantly worry about my child being overweight. I’m hoping that he will learn from our healthy example similar to how you feel.
Your baby bump and the candy basket look so cute and festive!
I was a die hard trick-or-treater, collecting as much candy as possible was the best part!
I remember having to put all our candy into a community bowl at home to share with everyone and of course I would eat too much candy Halloween night and the next day. After that I was over it and didn’t want anymore. We didn’t have junk in the house often so it was nice to have for a day or 2 then be over it relatively quickly.
I love that you are planning to not label foods as good or bad with your daughter. Encouraging a healthy relationship with food through words and setting an example will be great for her!
This is something I could discuss for hours, as I think my parents had a HUGE impact on my eating habits as a kid (they had good intentions, but the result was pretty atrocious). When it came to Halloween, however, I was allowed to eat the candy at my leisure. Usually I limited myself to 2 pieces a day (I liked bringing them in for lunch and trading with friends!)
I like your philosophy about food in the house. It’s something I’ve given a lot of thought to as well, and I think I’ll approach it in a very similar way.
I was always allowed to eat whatever I wanted. Much like you, we binged for a few days and the novelty wore off within a week. Moderation and balance are always key. I think kids should know that there is room for all kinds of foods, including treats 🙂
Oh my gosh ~ I just saw your Halloween Shirt! (I could not figure out how to leave a comment there) It is adorable!!! I love it! 🙂
thank you!
I really love the approach you’re taking with your soon to be baby! You sound like you’re being very reasonable and responsible. I love how you say that kids should at some point have some confetti cake! Obviously, only once and a while though. My parents stance on candy was they usually left it in a bowl and it was I guess a free reign sort of thing? But, I don’t remember ever gorging myself on it. Usually I got a piece in my lunch and maybe after dinner too. However, I always got burned out on candy about a week after Halloween.
I think each kid has to be policed differently when it comes to sweets. Some kids could care less about them and some that is all they want….well between pizza and fries and other garbage food. My son is 2, so no policy has been set in yet, because i hand everything to him…. if I see that he has a problem with being a little piggy with candy when older then he will be put on x amount of pieces a day.
Our Halloween policy was exactly the same as yours. My brothers and I usually realized that we needed to slow down on the candy after day two haha. My parents raised us the way they were raised. We always had a balanced meal, but unfortunately no one ever taught me about junk food, portion control, etc. But that’s because they weren’t educated about it themselves. They also cooked with way too much butter. I remember visiting my parents one day after living on my own for awhile, and my mom was cooking dinner. She was making green beans and stuck like a half a stick of butter on the beans! I was like OMG they taste so good without anything on it! That’s when I realized that’s just the way my parents were taught when they were younger. Fortunately I have never been over weight and was able to figure things out by taking an interest in healthy lifestyles. I now share with my parents what I have learned throughout the years.
We never had candy in our house and we never had desert. Halloween, my parents went thought the candy and we got candy for two days and then it mysteriously disappeared. Today, I do not like chocolate and do not care for sweets. I like an ice cream once in a blue moon and a piece of plain angel food cake. The rest of the sweets, not happening. The kids I babysat for had a cupboard full of candy they could have whenever they wanted. They also had rotten teeth. It will be interesting to see how all these new babies are brought up since they have such healthy and knowledgeable moms and dads.
My daughter was not allowed to eat her lunch and I got a big ole lecture on how to prepare a lunch. Why…because I sent my daughter to school with uncooked peas and I had not even removed them from the pod.
I was able to have and do whatever I want with my halloween candy. My cousins and I always traded eachother for our favorites 🙂 as for my son, I do limit his because he has autism and adhd, and too much sugar can lead to meltdowns for him. My daughter is only 19months, so obviously her sugar intake is very limited. As for my parents influence on me: they werent very healthy eaters, and very often we didnt have much food as I was growing up.. Sometimes we had nothing, so I think thats why I struggle with overeating. I do want to be a good example for my children, so I eat healthily for the most part:-)
I think its really important to let your kids have the freedom to get as much candy as they want! My best haloween memories are running from house to house in order to get the most candy. The first few nights I would eat way to much but eventually just a couple pieces a day satisfied me. However, I think it would be weird to go through the candy and take out the “bad” kind, you don’t want to start any disordered eating. I’m sure you will do whats right for yall though!
I was totally raised on processed food. My parents just didn’t know any better and even now both my parents still eat awful. Seriously, when I went away to college I thought KD was somewhat “good” for me because it wasn’t “junk food” and practically lived on it eating a box for dinner every night. No wonder I gained the freshman 15!
I love your food policy! I’m a pesco-vegetarian and my fiance is a meat eater (though we also rarely ever have red meat) and when people ask me how we’ll raise our kids I just say we’ll continue eating the way we do now and so will they! They will have meat, but not every night because we don’t eat that way now!
Great post 🙂
My siblings and I would dump our piles of candy on the living room floor, and make piles of each candy that we got. We’d take turns trading goodies and then my parents let us stash it away in our rooms. I remember months later my mom would find our pillow cases tucked away in our closets with stale candy…needless to say, the “wowness” wore off quickly haha. But maybe that’s because our dad was Willy Wonka and we kind of had access to candy whenever we wanted? I don’t know, but I sure enjoyed Halloween.
I also love that you want your baby girl to have a healthy relationship with food. I often wonder how I’ll handle that task as a mother. Trial and error I think, nothing we do will be perfect. But I think actions speak louder than words. You two being great examples and role-models will eventually rub off 🙂
I 100% agree with you. Do I want my kids to eat fresh fruits and veggies? Yes, of course. But do I want her to experience her first happy meal (say what you want, but I think every kid should experience it) and normal “kid” stuff? Yes. Or else she’ll be around all these other kids eating “normal” food and feel left out, and also may develop an unhealthy relationship with food.
I’m struggling with the fact (actually typed ‘fat’ there instead haha) that I want my kids to eat super good. I’m not even pregnant yet, but was already googling kid-friendly healthy snacks just today (weird, right?). I like your approach and she’ll appreciate that 🙂
My Mom and Dad (mostly my Mom bc she does the shopping and cooking) are very much a full-fat, cream and butter kinda people. My dad ALWAYS has dessert and my mom is of the “I’d rather be satisfied with a smaller portion of something delicious than a jumbo-sized bowl of yuck” frame of mind and she would throw one or two fun sized candies into our lunch or let us have one or two after dinner (provided we ate our veggies and has a glass of milk). I think it helped me a lot to learn at a small age that it’s ok to have a little bit of the good stuff as long as I ate nutrient-rich foods MOST of the time. She prided herself on that fact that we were very rarely sick (which is definitely related to how she fed us) and my my dad always kept us active. I think it’s different for everyone and every family, but I think she was definitely doing something right 🙂
I have always heard that it is best to decide WHAT your child is going to eat, and then let them moderate the AMOUNT that they are going to eat. So I suppose making candy a special treat, but not making it this big thing that has to be restricted and hid from them is most likely the best way to do it!
After my Mom went through the candy to make sure none of it was open, tampered with as far as she could tell or it wasn’t condoms we’d get to pick out 10 pieces. The rest of the candy we’d get a piece every now and then when she’d let us have it. She always had to check for condoms because 3 years in a row when we lived on Chanute AFB several of us ended up with condoms. Why someone was passing out condoms to kids is beyond me.
As for food, I learned my eating habits from my Mom definitely. I got my what not to eat from my Dad, he had a very limited diet which involved soda, ranch dressing, crackers and fast food. When I was young Mom made almost everything from scratch using whole foods. As I got older she started relying more on convenience foods until I was 13, that’s when I took over cooking most meals for our family. I loved planning our menu, going to the store and shopping for our food. I still love it. I let our kids eat a wide variety of things, even those that are less healthy, because my moto when it comes to food is all things in moderation.
condoms?! on an afb? so weird!!
It is so true, what you eat, your kids will eat. With my son, he is not used to sugary things, since we don’t eat them and seldom have them in the house. So when we go to birthday parties he will only eat half of a cupcake and he is done. I don’t tell him not to eat it, but since he’s used to not having it, he gets full a lot faster. Same with candy, he gets sick of it once he’s had too much and simply says. “no thanks”.
A local dentist is offering $1 for each pound of candy that kids bring in from trick or treating. All the candy gets sent overseas to the troops! Pretty good idea for the kids to learn that it can go to a good cause, it will make them feel good! Better than all that candy would feel!
that’s a fantastic idea!
Regarding the candy situation with kids, I believe in the everything in moderation factor. I don’t believe that unrestricted access to sweets and junk is good but I also don’t think banning them does the kid any favors either. I think your approach and attitude sounds like it’s going to work out well.
Really, just not stressing and not placing too big of a deal on a Snickers bar is the best approach for me, at least. There are far too many other things I have to worry about in my day than if I or my kid had a few bites of a Snickers or a cookie or a piece of cake type thing. Life and food just kind of works itself out and not placing too big of an emphasis, on “good”, “bad”, “healthy”, etc is the best way for us. We do our best but are not purists and don’t want to be. It’s fun to eat candy sometimes 🙂
My mom is uber-healthy. We never had potato chips, soda, Little Debbie or anything like that around the house! She made EVERY meal from scratch, including splurge foods. In 18 years at home, I don’t think I ever ate Kraft Mac ‘n cheese or a cookie out of a box. She was never preachy or made it felt lame, and in hindsight, I’m very grateful to her for that! We never got dessert as a “reward” for choking down the healthy food, we just ate what she fed us and enjoyed it with no preconceived notions of healthy vs. unhealthy, which is probably better. At age 4, I would eat an entire tomato in one sitting, but only because I liked the taste… not because I would have cared about the lycopene or the Vitamin C, ya know?
On Halloween, we would trick or treat and then come back to the house where we were pretty much allowed to sort through our candy and eat what we wanted, but only that one night. Then, she’d confiscate the candy, and as I found out later, send most if it to work with my dad to share with his office and give us 1 piece in our school lunches each day or keep it around as an occasional treat. Halloween was fun because of the dressing up and the excitement of the actual trick or treating, but I don’t remember ever having a long term fixation on the candy itself. I think I would tend to forget about it after that night!
I was always a big believer in kids being healthy eaters if they saw there parents being healthy eaters. Until….I had a kid and she ended up being a super picky eater! Pickles and mustard are two major staples in her diet.
My parents did pretty much what your’s did: checked our stuff out and let us have free reign. I had a very healthy relationship with food growing up because of the way my parents presented it: as a means to fuel the body. We also didn’t have a lot of junk in the house.
What my parents didn’t teach me was what a lot of bad food could do to the body. Because I was young, I could eat however much I wanted and it didn’t do much to me…no weight gained, nothing. This all changed as I got into my 30s and had my babies.
With my own kids, as far as trick or treating goes, they’re only 6 & 3, so they just love to get dressed up and go door to door. By the time they get home, and we take the candy away, they’ve forgotten about it. 🙂 We go through their stuff, hide it and take it out as “treats.” A bowl of candy can last us MONTHS. 🙂
My sister and I grew up giving our candy to the Candy Witch. When we got home, we’d each pick out a small tupperware container of our favorite/best candy (we’d trade some) and the rest would be set outside our bedroom doors for the Candy Witch. When we woke up the next morning, we’d get things like iTunes gift cards or some other little present that was way cooler (and healthier) than all the candy–a lot of which we didn’t like anyways (never went for the Butterfingers). I believe the Candy Witch took the rest to her office to be munched on by colleagues in the office kitchen. Hehe. Thanks, Mom.
I love this idea!
When my three brothers, cousins, and I all went trick-or-treating every year, we would fill our pillow cases and when we got back to the house we would always pour them out and trade. The funny thing is I don’t ever remember stuffing myself sick with candy, I always just saved my favorites and maybe once in a while I would go in my drawer and get a piece, but the majority always ended up in a bowl on the kitchen table for whoever wanted it (always had a ton of my brother’s friends over). My parents never restricted us on candy. My mom was always a big cooker too! She always made sure we had a vegetable with every dinner and we barely ever were allowed pop in the house. I would say I am the healthiest eater in my house right now, but my family pretty healthy and is starting to pick up some of my eating choices too! haha
🙂
I allow my kids to pick 3 treats from their stash each night after dinner. They also get to pick 2 for their school lunch. I can’t say that they’ve ever finished all their candy, either. Usually all the suckers end up left in the bag!